Avian Aesthetics in Literature and Culture

Danette DiMarco is professor of English at Slippery Rock University. Timothy Ruppert is assistant professor of English at Slippery Rock University.

• Introduction: The Continuous Line Between Birds and Humans in Animal Studies TodayDanette DiMarco and Timothy RuppertSECTION 1 - The Avian-ness of AestheticsChapter 1: Birdwatching and Wordwatching: The Avian Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs DallowayJemma DeerChapter 2Birds as Character, Motif, Allusion, and Symbol in Meir Shalev’s A Pigeon and a BoyLaura MajorChapter 3: “With An Aviary Inside Its Head”: Surrealist Sensibilities and Avian Ontologies in the Work of J. G. Ballard and Ted HughesDeclan LloydChapter 4: The Optimism of Flight: Magical Realism in Little Nemo in SlumberlandMark O’ConnorSECTION 2 - Writing About/Like BirdsChapter 5: The Fate of Birds in Anatole France’s Penguin IslandTimothy RuppertChapter 6: Of Curlews and Crows: Representations of Avian Cognition in North American Animal StoriesJennifer SchellChapter 7: What is it like to write (like) a bird?: Rethinking Literary Practice to Support Avian SubjectivityJoshua LobbChapter 8: Margaret Atwood’s Bir

These essays constitute an intense and fascinating study of the strangeness of birds and the variety of ways writers and other cultural creators try to comprehend and represent them. This book provides enlightening considerations of what birds do for us culturally—from powering flights of imagination to providing the most accessible entrance to the natural world—and what we do to birds as we mistakenly humanize them and directly or indirectly destroy them.